By M. Isi Eromosele

Engagement on the Social Web means customers or stakeholders become participants rather than viewers. It’s the difference between seeing a movie and participating in its screening. The difference is participation.

Engagement, in a social business sense means your customers are willing to take their time and energy to talk to you, as well as about you in conversations and through processes that impact your business. They are willing to participate and it is this participation that defines engagement in the context of the Social Web.

The engagement process is, therefore, fundamental to successful social marketing and to the establishment of successful social business practices. Engagement in a social context implies that customers have taken a personal interest in what you are bringing to the market.

In an expanded sense, this applies to any stakeholder and carries the same notion: A personal interest in your business outcome has been established. This applies to customers, to partners, to employees, to anyone who can express and share an opinion or idea somewhere along your path to market.

As customer conversations enter the purchase cycle in the consideration phase of the sales process, there is a larger implication: Your customer is now a part of your marketing department. In fact, your customers and what they think and share with each other form the foundation of your business or organization.

The impact is both subtle and profound: Subtle in the sense that on the surface much of social business amounts to running a business the way a business ought to be run.

Businesses exist to serve customers through whose patronage the founders, employees, shareholders and others generally derive an economic benefit from as they are ensured a future in running that business. At times, however, it seems the customer gets dropped from that set. The result can be seen on Twitter most any day by searching for the hashtag #FAIL

It’s also a profound change, however, in the sense that the stakes in pleasing the customer are now much higher. Customers are more knowledgeable and more vocal about what they want and they are better prepared to let others know about it in cases of over-delivery or under-delivery.

Not only are customers seeing what the business and others in the industry are doing, they are building their own expectations for your business based on what every other business they transact with is doing.

Social business, therefore, is about equipping your entire organization to listen, engage, understand and respond directly through conversation and by extension in the design of products and services in a manner that not only satisfy customers but also encourages them to share their delight with others. If social media is the vehicle for success, social business is the interstate system on which it rides into your organization.

What scares a lot of marketers is the exact opposite: customers sharing dismay or worse. Negative conversations are happening right now. Your participation doesn’t change that. What does change is that those same naysayers should have company - you. You can engage, understand, correct factual errors and apologize as you address and correct the real issues.

Encouraging participation in discussion forums or helping your customers publish and rate product or service reviews can help you build business and it can put in place the best practices you’ll need to succeed in the future.

Social business includes product design, pricing, options, customer service, warranty and the renewal/re-subscription process and more. All told, social business is an organization-wide look at the interactions and dependencies between customers and businesses connected by information-rich and very much discoverable conversations.

In social media, anything that catches a consumer or prospective customer’s attention about your company is fair game for conversation. It may happen between four people or four million.

This includes expectations exceeded as well as expectations not met, and runs the spectrum from what appears to be minute to what is more significant. News travels fast, and nowhere does it travel faster than the Social Web.

The Social Web revolves around conversations, social interactions and the formation of groups that in some way act on collective knowledge. Social media analytics is focused on understanding and managing specific attributes of the conversation: sentiment, source, and polarity, for example.

Social business takes it a step further and asks “How or why did this conversation arise in the first place?” For example, is the conversation rooted in a warranty process failure? The practice of social business is helpful in determining how to fix it.

Is a stream of stand-out comments being driven by a specific, exceptional employee? Social-business-based processes will help your organization create more employees like that one.

From a business perspective, understanding how conversations about you on social media come to exist and how to tap the information they contain is key to understanding how to leverage the Social Web.

Social business processes and technologies share insights generated by customers, suppliers, partners or employees through collaborative applications in ways that actually transform a conversation into useful ideas and practical business processes.

Social business is built around a composite of technologies, processes and behaviors that facilitate the spread of experiences (not just facts) that engender collaborative behavior. An easy way to think about social technology and its application to business is in its conveyance of meaning and not just attributes such as source, even as it offers what a business can do in response to the information received.

Social business is built around collaborative processes that link customers to the brand by engaging them as a part of the Product Development Cycle. Social business includes the design of an external engagement process in which participants are systematically brought into the social processes surrounding and supporting the business.

This is achieved within the communities frequented by stakeholders through the implementation of the community and associated software services. These social applications include the internal business processes that link across the organization and connect consumers and employees with the business as a whole and facilitate the process of customer engagement.

The Engagement Process

Engagement is central to the effective use of social technology and the creation of social business. Unlike traditional media and the business processes of selling based on it, social technologies push toward collaboration rather than exposure and impression.

In the first wave of social technology that occurred on the Social Web, collaboration between consumers took off as they recognized that by sharing experiences they could (collectively) make better purchase decisions.

In the context of social business, the process of engagement is expanded to include not only the collaborative activity that occurs between customers but also the activities that connect the business with its customers as well as those that connect the employees inside the business, where this connectivity fosters sharing and collaboration so that employees may more effectively respond to customers’ needs.

The social engagement process moves customers and similar participants in brand, product or service-related conversations beyond the act of consumption and toward the shared act of working together to collaborate and produce an experience that improves over time.

Consumption

The first of the foundational blocks in the process of building strong customer engagement is consumption. Consumption, as used in the context of social media, means downloading, reading, watching or listening to digital content. Consumption is the basic starting point for nearly any online activity and especially so for social activities.

It’s essentially impossible to share, for example, without consuming first: habitually retweeting without first reading and determining applicability to your audience, for example, will generally turn out badly. More practically, if no one reads a particular piece of content, how would they share it?

Because humans filter information, what we share is only a subset of what we consume. As a result, consumption far outweighs any other process on the Social Web: It’s thatching that holds that the majority of the people on the Web are taking (consuming) rather than putting back (creating).

Curation

Curation is the act of sorting and filtering, rating, reviewing, commenting on, tagging or otherwise describing content. Curation makes content more useful to others. For example, when someone creates a book review, the hope is that the review will become the basis for a subsequent purchase decision.

Curation is an important social action in that it helps shape, prune and generally increase the signal-to-noise ratio within the community. Note as well that curation happens not only with content, but also between members themselves.

The process of curation is the first point at which a participant in the social process is actually creating something. Consumption, as defined in social media, is a one-directional action: You read, you download, you listen, etc. Consumption, by itself, does not drive social interaction.

Curation is, therefore, a very important action to encourage. Curation teaches people to participate, to create, in small, low-risk steps that are easy to grasp. Introducing your audience to curation makes it easy for them to become active members of the community and to participate in the later creative and collaborative processes that drive it over the long term. That’s how you build a community.

Creation

Beyond curation is what is more generally recognized as content creation. Unlike curation, a great first step that requires little more than a response to an event, content creation requires that community members actually offer up something that they have made themselves.

This is a significantly higher hurdle, so it’s something for which you’ll want to have a very specific plan.

Driving this content creation reuires a simple underlying theme: People like to share what they are doing, talk (post) about the things that interest them and generally be recognized for their own contributions within the larger community.

Reputation management, a key element in encouraging social interaction is based directly on the quantity and quality of the content created and shared by individual participants. The combination of easy content publishing, curation and visible reputation management are the cornerstones of a strong community.

Collaboration

Finally, at the top of the set of the core social-business building blocks is collaboration. Collaboration is a key inflection point in the realization of a vibrant community and the port of entry for true social business.

The collective use of ratings aside, consumption, curation, and creation can be largely individual activities. That can build traffic, can build a content library and can drive page views, all important aspects of a media property. But they aren't necessarily strong social actions. Collaboration is.

Collaboration occurs naturally between members of the community when given the chance. Blogging is a good example. Take a look at a typical blog that you subscribe to and you’ll find numerous examples of posts, reinterpreted by readers through comments that flow off to new conversations between the blogger and the readers.

Bloggers often adapt their product on-the-fly based on the inputs of the audience. Blogging and the way in which participant input shapes the actual product is a deceptively simple example of what is actually a difficult process: Taking direct input from a customer and using it in the design of your product.

Many effective bloggers take direction from readers’ comments and then build a new thought based on the reader’s interests and thoughts. This is actually a window into what social business is all about: Directly involving your customers in the design and delivery of what you make.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

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